It has been hypothesized that there might be a component of normal individual blood serum which prevents the invasion of certain cancer cells in a healthy individual. Reference to comparative studies of components of normal healthy individual blood sera as compared with cancer patient sera, particularly with respect to organic solvent extracts, could not be found in the literature.
In order to test this hypothesis, a large number of samples of blood from normal individuals and from individuals suffering from various malignancies were taken and the sera were extracted with the following organic solvents:
methylene chloride PA0 benzene PA0 petroleum ether PA0 toluene PA0 diethyl ether. PA0 1. breast carcinoma PA0 2. carcinoma of the colon PA0 3. bronchogenic carcinoma.
The sera of both normal individuals and cancer patients were acidified, shaken with the above solvents, separated and evaporated to dryness. In those cases where any discernible residues were found, the only time that there was a difference between the results of the tests with normal individual sera as opposed to cancer patient sera, was found with the diethyl ether extraction. There was a white precipitate in the diethyl ether extracts of all normal individual's sera, although to different extents, but no precipitate from the diethyl ether extracts of cancer patients' sera.
This extract was tested and was found to be extremely toxic to cancer cells while totally non-toxic to normal cells.